by Will Carver
Of course the local barbershop would not be open the day after the owner’s family was brutally slain on the street. It was taking Hinton Hollow’s the-show-must-go-on attitude to the limits to expect any different.
Nathan Hadley returned home that morning. He had been drinking heavily the night before. He had stayed out. He had been to places he should not have visited. And he was back in his house. Nobody was watching it in Pace’s absence – the police force was too small and were tied up with May Tambor’s murder.
Hadley’s Hair is no longer there.
That day was the last day of trade. The final customer receiving only half a haircut.
The premises were taken over years later by an estate agency.
Ablett and Frith.
The town moved on.
A SLIGHT TURN
The cigarette hissed as it hit the bottom of Pace’s coffee cup. He left it on the floor where Ellie could find it the next time she had to escape her overbearing boss.
He waded into the centre of Hinton Hollow. The traffic lights were red and he didn’t have time to park around the back of the shops. Pace yanked the steering wheel to the right and mounted the kerb outside RD’s diner. Some pedestrians showed their disapproval with spite-filled looks but that was as far as they’d take it. The tall shadow that emerged from the vehicle held himself in a way that made it clear it was not worth approaching him.
Pace pushed open the café door and everybody turned around to view him. Quite the opposite reaction to the one he had witnessed on his arrival on that first day.
RD saluted him with two fingers of his right hand and Pace approached the counter.
The café owner started pouring a black coffee in anticipation, he liked to do this for all his regulars, remember their drink without them even having to order.
‘Thanks, RD, but this is just a flying visit.’ He’d said that once before.
‘Well, take it to go, eh? You look like you need it.’ He emptied the mug into a large paper cup. ‘What’s with the flying visit?’
‘Mrs Beaufort.’
RD, eyes wide, nodded to his left to move Pace away from the ears of the locals.
‘What’s wrong? Another turn? I don’t want to add to a rampant gossip mill.’
‘She’s fine. A slight turn. A reaction to some bad news but she’s at the surgery now. She’ll need a lift home. I’d do it myself but there have been a few developments in the case that I need to jump on right now.’
‘Bad news?’
Of course, that’s the part of the information he holds on to.
‘I shouldn’t really say but I guess Mrs Beaufort will tell you when you collect her. You can collect her?’
‘I’ll leave now.’ RD’s wife appeared with a Victoria sponge on a glass cake stand. Her timing was impeccable, as always.
‘Okay. Thanks.’ Pace looked over his shoulder. Outside he could see people walking past his badly parked car and shaking their heads at it. ‘Look, I guess you know Mrs Tambor.’
‘May? Of course. Tough few years. She’s taken it hard.’ His sincerity was matched by his wife’s apprehension as she stood a few feet behind him.
‘Well, I’m afraid she was found at her home this morning. I’m sorry.’
RD’s wife dropped the cake, the delicate stand smashing over the floor behind the counter, its noise turning everyone’s attention away from Pace and RD.
‘I’m so sorry, RD, but I’ve got to go. Thanks for helping with Mrs Beaufort. I’ll come back when I’m done. Thanks for the coffee.’ He seemed to speak the sentence as though it were all one long word. Then he turned and left before anybody in the café had even realised he’d gone. He was like a ghost.
He was the wind.
Detective Sergeant Pace was a hurricane.
Detective Sergeant Pace is your irritable bowel.
Pace reversed off the pavement and headed off towards Roylake.
TOUGHER. MEANER. LESS SCARED.
Dorothy was still dead. Morbid obesity plus the natural bloating that comes with decomposition. Her doorbell rang.
A lonely figure in her lifetime, she was not immune to a friend or two calling by. But not that week. It was part of her regular routine. A standing order for a curry delivery. She always worked from home that day of the week and, instead of walking and queueing and waiting, she had arranged for a regular drop-off of buttered chicken with pilau rice, onion bhajis, sag aloo, Bombay potatoes and two keema naans, for her lunch.
The bell rang again.
Dorothy’s skin was starting to mottle.
Again it rang, six times, in case she hadn’t heard it because she was in the shower or something.
Then the food was laid down on the doormat as the delivery guy bent down to shout through the letterbox.
‘Miss Reilly. Miss Reilly, are you there? It’s your butter chicken, Miss Reilly.’
He waited. He rang the bell again. Then waited some more. Finally leaving the bag of food to go cold on the doorstep, he looked straight ahead with spite running through him and spat, ‘You fucking fat fuck.’ Aiming his venom somewhere safe.
It’s so easy now.
Behind a closed door.
From the safety of your own car as you drive past, giving someone the finger or shouting abuse.
From the warmth of your house as you hide behind an online persona that is tougher than you really are or smarter than you really are or more opinionated and outspoken than you really are.
Meaner than you really are.
Less scared than you really are.
This is you, now.
This is people.
This is what I have to stop.
LEATHER. AND GUNS.
Charles Ablett’s was the grandest of all the houses that Pace had visited since returning to his childhood town. Four bedrooms for a bachelor would have been considered overkill, but even with the small amount of knowledge that Pace had about Charles, he imagined each room to have a double bed for a different lady, perhaps even themed, running his home like a bordello.
An impractical penis-extension of a two-seater sports car sat out the front of a double garage so Pace assumed that his prime suspect was home and simply not answering his brother’s hot-headed messages.
Whose wife is he screwing in there? Pace wondered. Is that how he chooses his next victim?
As he neared the property, there was no sound coming from the house at all. No daytime mind-numbing chat show. No 5.1 surround sound modern R&B anthems. No screams of pleasure, nor displeasure from the upstairs windows.
Pace rapped the door with the back of his hand.
There was nothing.
He tried again, harder, saying, ‘Mr Ablett. This is Detective Sergeant Pace. Your brother is worried about you. Please answer the door so that I may assuage his concern.’
Pushing the letterbox open, Pace was hit by the warmth from inside. It seemed odd to have the heating up that high if he was supposed to be at work. Though, if Ellie’s words were true, there was every chance that he would usually be at home at this time of day.
And his car was sat in the drive.
Unless he had two cars.
Or was using somebody else’s.
He waited. There was no time to waste. A few precious hours before the bell rang for the end of the school day. There was no movement inside the house. No creak of a floorboard or stair that would’ve made the detective lift his knee and thrust his foot towards the door. No one to pull him away.
Maybe that’s what I was there for.
Pace was patient. He waited on the doorstep, hoping for the sound of a mistake. He moved around the back of the house – certainly not procedure to vault a garden fence but sometimes rules just get in the way of discovery.
The lounge was visible from the back window. White leather sofas and one wall that seemed to be made up entirely of a television screen. Ablett was a fabulously boring cliché in Pace’s mind. A cut-price Scarface. There was bound to be a framed poste
r of the movie hanging proudly on some wall in the house. There was no noise escaping the windows at the back of the house either.
Maybe Charles Ablett was not inside the house, Pace reasoned.
He was there.
And he wasn’t the only person who knew that.
SHUT UP AND LISTEN
‘Fuck.’
His phone had died and Pace vented his frustration on the inside of his car, punching the steering wheel with the fleshy part of a clenched hand.
‘Stupid piece of shit only lasts half a day. What’s the fucking point?’
He threw the piece of shit into the passenger footwell and kept on driving across town. It had been over an hour since he’d stepped over Mrs Tambor in her hallway. It had started to feel like Hinton Hollow was closing in on him. His shadow, his past, creating a black hole that threatened to suck the historical town into non-existence.
The barriers of decency had come down and information was suddenly allowed to pass freely. Names kept coming up. Motives were arising. Evidence was growing. He dare not say it aloud but perhaps even a pattern was emerging.
Liv Dunham was opening her front door as Pace pulled up to the kerb at the bottom of her front garden. There was no car parked in the drive.
Everything about her screamed average.
Normal.
Nice.
Good.
She was no more than six inches above five feet in height. Her hair was a straight, clean, natural blonde. She wasn’t out of shape, either. Though she wasn’t in shape. It wasn’t like she had a gut hanging over her trousers, but he wouldn’t put her down as a gym-goer. Perhaps recently to ensure she’d fit into that wedding dress, but she was slim, with breasts that matched her hips.
Liv was standing at her front door when Detective Sergeant Pace walked through her gate. He was there to see Oz Tambor, to deliver the horrific news about his mother. He’d asked Constable Reynolds to send him the details of the woman who had called about her missing fiancé but he hadn’t checked his messages and now his phone had died.
If he had, he would have recognised that she had the same address that he’d been given by Anderson for Oz Tambor. Another link. Another drawing pin. Another piece of string.
Another broken window.
He was walking into the unknown.
He was expecting to knock on the door and be greeted with a typically sunny Hinton Hollow welcome by a Mr Oscar Tambor. But the door was already opening before he arrived. Somebody had beaten him to that address. He didn’t know Liv Tambor but he knew that neither of the people standing in front of him was the man he had come to see.
A LOVELY SURPRISE
This is what had happened.
The detective was pissed off and overloaded with work and information. He dropped Mrs Beaufort at the surgery and sped off to give a man he didn’t know some information that he did not relish in delivering. She had been an unwanted burden on his already hectic and draining re-entry into the Hinton Hollow community. Sure, she was all goodwill and butterflies to her family but backhandedness and cockroaches to Detective Sergeant Pace.
The city Pace would have dumped her on the side of the road with a ten-pound note and told her to hold her thumb out to cars. But he had been more conscientious, driving her to the local surgery to meet with the town’s beloved, long-standing doctor.
She walked up to the front desk but did not make an appointment with Sandra on reception – she should have, she was in a bad way and needed to be resting – but instead chose to converse with Sandra about the upcoming wedding and the possibility of calling a town meeting in the next week.
When Mrs Beaufort exited the surgery, Pace was long gone, though he would be taking a detour on his way to Oz Tambor. She popped another couple of her glyceryl trinitrate pills and set off.
Another long walk across the town she had always loved. Thinking that the onus to help rested solely on her thin withering shoulders. Plus me. Making sure she meddled. Because her insecurity about being insignificant in that town was more than enough to control her.
The trek took her about an hour. Almost the same amount of time it had taken Detective Sergeant Pace to extract information from Roger Ablett and interrogate Ellie Frith. And swing by RD’s Diner to ask for a favour. And stalk the home of Charles Ablett.
Almost, but not quite.
She’d arrived at Oz Tambor’s and Liv Dunham’s house a minute earlier and pressed the doorbell with one hand while resting her weight against the wall with the other. She was out of breath and there was pain in her chest but she had got there and she had beaten him.
‘Mrs Beaufort. Er, what a lovely surprise.’ Liv brushed her hair behind her ear. She sounded out of breath, too. ‘I wasn’t expecting … anybody, to be honest.’
She was not being honest.
Liv looked up over Mrs Beaufort’s shoulder to see a dark, unknown figure approaching. Mrs Beaufort could see the expression on the young teacher’s face was fear.
F e a r.
She turned around to see her least favourite detective.
He didn’t look particularly pleased to see her standing there, either.
Her concern lay with Liv, though, and the reason she had reacted in the way that she had.
A GHOST
The two-day stubble hid his real face behind its shadow. He was tall. Handsome, too, his hair ruffled in a care-free way that implied that he did care. At least a little. But that is not the reason he caught Liv Dunham’s breath.
The figure emerged through the gate, his coat billowing at the sides like broken wings. He was the wind. His pitted coal eyes only burned greyer as he closed in on her. She cursed herself for giving away the fact that she was at home alone when taking that first anonymous, breathy phone call. It was her own fault.
She had convinced herself that it was Oz that had called her on that first night, though the person at the other end never uttered a single word, and on the third had simply stuttered something. She’d even managed to sleep. But doubt had crept back in the morning just as it had before and she persuaded herself that the person calling her certainly was not her fiancé.
For a second, and only for a second, she considered shutting herself back inside the house, using the door as a barrier, leaving Mrs Beaufort outside to deal with the approaching terror.
She was shaking. Surely this was not it. Not in broad daylight.
But two young boys had already taken a bullet through the heart that week on their way home from school and the women seemed to be having their identities erased. In fact, everyone who had died that week in Hinton Hollow had perished during broad daylight.
All but one.
And they were yet to be found.
And Oz, who wasn’t dead yet.
Mrs Beaufort had one foot ready to step into the Tambor/Dunham home. She peered up at Liv Dunham and lowered her foot at the young woman’s expression. She did not quite seem to be herself. She was anxious, her eyes conveying some disbelief. It was as if she had seen a ghost.
COME IN
REMEMBER: IN TIMES OF DIFFICULTY
Denial. Solidarity. A stiff upper lip. Breakdown. Inner strength. Retaliation. War. Prayer.
This is what people do.
Liv was surviving on hope alone.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Pace.’ He held out a hand and Liv accepted it with her own. It was strong. His hands were warm, but not kind. She audibly sighed and let the relaxation drop from her shoulders but only for a moment before the fear returned.
‘Nice to see you again, Detective. Took your time.’ Mrs Beaufort’s mouth curled at one side in a grin meant only for Pace’s tired eyes.
‘A good day to you, too, Mrs Beaufort. How are you feeling? I see that you must have been given the all-clear by Doctor Green.’
‘Doctor?’ Liv responded in the only way she knew how. Forgetting about her own trepidation, releasing the fear she was holding on to about the disappearance of the man she wanted to marry that weekend
. In that moment, she only cared about the welfare of the town’s matriarch. It was this genuine compassion that made her such a great teacher.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, dear. Just a bit of a fall.’ She tried to brush it off.
Well played, Detective. Well played.
Liv turned her attention back to the man on her doorstep. She was no longer wary of him, but was now frightened he was only there to deliver bad news. That is the reason the police come to your door at an odd hour, they are there to inform you that somebody you love has been taken away from you. Somebody has died.
Pace could see that her eyes were beginning to well up. She was trying to be strong.
‘I’m actually here to speak with Oscar Tambor. Is he home?’ Pace asked.
‘I’m Liv Dunham, his fiancée.’ The name sparked behind the detective’s eyes. ‘If you’re here to speak with Oz then you’d better come in.’
SO MANY MESSAGES
There were two places set for breakfast at the kitchen table. One plate still had one and a half pieces of cold, limp, buttered toast resting sadly. Liv was just holding on.
Hinton Hollow was just holding on.
She flicked the switch on the kettle and proceeded to dither and potter about, opening the jar she kept teabags fresh in, picking some semi-skimmed milk from the fridge, grabbing a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer, all the time with her back to the detective. Keeping herself busy.
Busy doing nothing.
Pace needed this opportunity to speak with Liv alone, without the acidic tongue of the beloved town elder who was left sitting in the living room on a comfortable chair. Liv was going to prepare the hot beverages herself, but Pace had benevolently offered his services and insisted that Mrs Beaufort take the opportunity to rest after such a long walk. He had even managed to condescend to her by using that term she hated so much – a woman in your condition.
